Delta made news last fall when they made changes to their frequent flier program, SkyMiles. Effective January 1, 2024, the airline retired Medallion Qualification Miles and Medallion Qualification Segments—its metric for earning status based on distance and flights flown, respectively.

Instead, earning Delta elite status in 2024 is dependent on Medallion Qualification Dollars (MQDs), or the amount you spend on Delta flights and other products within the Delta ecosystem. With this new revenue-based model for status, several premium Delta cards can give you a boost in working toward status. These cards will also earn MQDs at a slightly higher rate.

There’s good and bad news here. The bad news is that I expect this trend to continue, with more airlines moving toward awarding status based on dollars spent instead of miles flown. But, credit cards could and should play more of a role in earning revenue-based status. I hope to see premium co-branded airline credit cards offering ways to help make status more attainable. The MQD status boost on Delta cards is not adequate alone.

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Did you enjoy this prediction? Check out the rest of the series!

This question is from Kurt Adams' travel points and miles predictions at Going.com. This is a brand new prediction series for 2024 for Kurt, and the second series for Going.com. I am an unaffiliated Manifold user replicating the proposals here on Manifold.

I will resolve this market based on Kurt's self-stated resolution at the end of the year. See notes below.

In the same fashion I used for Scott Keyes' predictions last year, I am setting the close date ahead of the end of this year to (try to) avoid a situation where the resolutions post before the market closes. In the event that his resolution post falls in 2025, my apologies in advance. If he hasn't posted resolutions at all by February 1, 2025, I will do my best to resolve them personally, and set N/A for any questions that I can't determine with outside (non-Going) source data.